So long and thanks for all the fish!
by 4'33'johncage
Summary: The wedding is only days away and Jack has returned to Port Royal in order to celebrate with his friends the Turners. These have picked up a girl who is in fact a runaway mermaid! yep, the summary is nothing compared to the actual story, take a look. if d


Nothing belongs to me ;( well apart from Katalinya or.. Katherine

Enjoy .

Chapter 1: Jack Gets Hurt

"Jack? 'Ey! Jack!"

Black eyes snapped open at hearing the name, "'M 'wake.. I'm wake… What is it Gibbs?"

The elderly rigid man sitting next to him grinned, "Yer awake…Good. I was scared you wouldn't wake up at all.."

"What happened?"

Gibbs sighed heavily, "Yer curiosity's worse than that of a cat. Next time ye pull a stunt like that, young man, I'll have ye keelhauled."

Jack groaned when suddenly the pain hit him like a blow to the face, he could barely keep his voice from shaking, "And I thought I was the captain…"

Black eyes closed again. Jack was out cold for the second time that night.

Gibbs sighed; he had been sitting here in the captain's quarters almost all night long, watching how his young friend fought to stay alive. It had been quite hard for him to find him passed out from loss of blood in that back alley, next to a dead whore. He had ordered the crew to come and pick him up, who carried him back to his ship. Their captain had suffered a bad injury, blood covering most of his chest and face when Gibbs found him. Now he was lying in his bunk, stitched up and cleaned from the blood. The captain of the vessel looked very young when asleep, Gibbs mused, almost like a young lad. The dark kohl that usually surrounded Jacks eyes had been washed off along with the blood, and the red bandana around his head had been removed in order to stitch a gash present there, up. Gibbs took a swig from his hipflask; Jack was going to be all right, he had woken up. Gibbs could go to bed and rest for the rest of the night. Still, he thought, someone should stay with him until dawn.

Gibbs rose from his seat and glanced down at his captain one last time who was sleeping soundly. Then he turned to leave the cabin.

After ordering a crewmember into the captain's cabin to watch over Jack, he went below deck into his own cabin.

"One day that curiosity of his will be his death", Gibbs thought, grinning.

After all it was curiosity that had cost him his pearl. Instead of recruiting some madman into his first mate and going after the Isle de La Muer..uh.. Moue… uhm.. Muerta! That's the one! Yes, instead of staying with just pillaging and plundering other ships on sea, like a normal pirate does, with a normal amount of curiosity, he had to follow his abnormal curiosity to that cursed island. Well and that's when the mutinity happened. And had he not been so curious last night, or.. earlier tonight, then he wouldn't have followed that scream into a back alley. Ergo, he wouldn't have tried to defend some random prostitute from being stabbed by some drunk idiot who then in turn wouldn't have stabbed an even drunker pirate captain: Jack. Had he been less nosey about things than he was, he wouldn't ever have gotten into any trouble! No impersonation of a clergyman… Gibbs groaned by just thinking back to that one episode when he met Jack dressed as a priest and drunk as a skunk and well, horny as a rabbit. Gibbs covered his eyes with his hand by thinking back to that one very embarrassing episode. Jack didn't only clear the poor box from any contents but he had also cleared the communion wine and as if that wasn't enough he had actually seduced three nuns into committing sins they wouldn't even have thought about in their wildest dreams.

It was Gibbs who got him out of this one, when the bishop found out.

Well, and if he would just mind his own business, just sometimes, he wouldn't have stumbled into another little episode containing a Russian prostitute, a Buddhist monk and a lot of hemp and a revolution amongst laundry workers in Milan, Italy. Gibbs shuddered, thinking back to how he got him out of that one as well.

Anyway, Gibbs yawned, it had been a long night, and he was tired.

IN a short while, he was asleep too in his own bunk.

The sun was irritating him. A lot. He groaned and wanted to roll over to his side when suddenly he felt the pain shoot through him like lightning and he saw white lights behind his eyelids.

"Bloody…" he buried his face in his pillow muttering and groaning curse words.

"Easy does it, capt'n. ye're still very much hurt. Best not move to much."

Jack groaned, "Fetch me some rum, will ye!"

Martin Jacobsen, his cabin boy, complied and got up to get him some rum.   
Jack eagerly took it from the boy and swallowed down the vile taste of blood. He looked around himself, wondering what the hell happened to him. He was lying in his bunk in his cabin, only dressed in breeches. His chest was wrapped up and his head hurt like ten hangovers at once, while he could barley feel his arm, and his shoulder was numb.

"Twas a nasty dagger bite ye got yerself there, sir. But Gibbs n' Bailey stitched ye up and ye're ready te go again in about a week or so."

"Nice…", Jack mumbled, feeling weaker than a leave in wind.

"Aye! We're still dogged in Tortuga, it's up to ye when we're ready te sail to Port Royal."

"Bloody Port Royal.. Someone nearly took me arm off, why the bloody hell should I want to go to…"; and then it hit him, "oh.." he opened his eyes after having closed them against the pain, "The wedding of the whelp and whelpette, isn't it?"

his left, good, hand moved to his two braids in his goatee beard and started tugging at them in thought, "Aye… I love weddings… Lots a pick pocketing, free alcohol and usually a great band. Aye, cabin boy, help me up, I'll order the men to set sail towards Jamaica. After all the wedding's in a week! We'll make one stop in Coteaux, then I want te be in Port Royal at the end o' the week."

"Uh, Gibbs told me te make sure ye stay in bed, sir."

"What? I'm yer captain! Ye will follow me orders! Help me up!", Jack moved in order to get up, but when he attempted to sit up, he was again hit by another wave of pain, "Ah… maybe Gibbs is right… I'll probably.. just stay here for a while…get me more rum, and get Gibbs in here!"

after that sails where set and the aesthetic vessel was moving slowly but gracefully out of the harbor. The Black Pearl, who was captained by the one and only Jack Sparrow, excuse me, Captain Jack Sparrow, was heading for Jamaica, Port Royal. Because her captain, the now injured, but otherwise flamboyant and legendary, Jack, to attend a wedding, that of his two good friends, the whelp and whelpette. (otherwise known as Will Turner and Elisabeth Swann.)

Far away from the sailing Black Pearl, and far away from the Island of Tortuga, and relatively far away from Port Royal, there was in fact a little mermaid sitting on her rock sighing sadly, while she looked out onto the horizon with a forlorn look in her eyes.

She had long reddish-dirty blonde hair, which had grown to her waist, spilling all around her. Freckles were dusted onto her nose and cheeks while her skin was not exactly pale, but neither was she tanned. She was, as are all mermaids, bare-chested, and she had a silvery blue grayish fin or tail, starting from her hipbones off. Her fish tail was in fact the same colour as her eyes were. Those eyes that looked so sad and depressed. The fact was her heart had been broken not long ago, and she was fed up with mermen.  
She was just swimming happily amongst some dolphins, freeing some fish from evil fishing hooks, telling jokes to an enormous whale and enjoying the multicolored corals of the Caribbean, when she decided she wanted to swim home to her little underwater cave, that she shared with her ex-merman, when she discovered him and her supposedly best friend mating. Well, that was a shock to her. She had started yelling, shouting and throwing things at the two traitors half-fish-half-human-creatures, before she stormed out of that cave.

Why did he do that? Why did he cheat on her? Didn't he know who she was? Daughter of the great ruler of all mermaids and mermen, King Derack, all she had to do was tell her father and he would be shark-bait.

However, something told her not to tell her powerful and mighty father. Somehow she didn't care. Those two traitorous jellyfish deserved each other. She didn't feel very much for him anyways, she reflected.

In fact she didn't really feel anything other than emptiness and now loneliness.

"So much for happy mermaid-princess..", she snorted unlady-like, "living happily under the sea."

She bended her fin and pulled it towards her upper body and wound her arms around it. Much like a human being does it with their legs. She placed her head on her scaled fin and sighed again.

By now her body had become completely dry, so that her hair had dried and formed some wavy curls in her blondish hair. She felt how her scales suddenly disappeared and turned into pink skin. Suddenly her fin split in two and she had two legs with two feet and looked just like a naked human being.

She sighed, wiggling her toes a bit.

Against popular belief, mermaids only had a fin when they were in water. Once they got onto dry land and are partially dry, their fin morphed into two legs, allowing them to walk around on land just as easily as a normal human being. However, their walking does look like the swaggering of a drunken sailor trying to get his land legs back after months of sailing. But just like sailors they get their land legs eventually.

Oh, and against popular belief, mermaids did actually exist. But their existence had gone by unnoticed by most humans throughout time. (why else would fishermen pull out old boots when they thought a fish had bit their fishing hooks making their fishing rod actually move. Well, that's because that was the number one prank amongst the mer people. The look on the fishermen's faces had always been priceless!)

Anyway, back to the sad mermaid princess.

"Maybe I should just swim away", she thought bitterly, "Then I wouldn't have to marry that cheating bastard."

Princess Katalinya had actually been set up with this marriage, as her cheating husband to be was the mermaid prince Harock. One charming bastard. All the other mermaids saw him as the sexiest half-fish alive and thought he was way too good for her, as she didn't really appreciate the thought of marrying him. What they didn't know was, that he was very arrogant and egocentric. And he loved all females. Mermaids or otherwise.

She shuddered at that thought. He was really some kind of freak. By now Katalinya was actually quite happy not having ever mated or having to mate or even marry that guy. He was a creep.

Again, she considered the possibility of swimming away.

"Why not?", she thought.

"Because you're princess Katalinya, and your father is King Derack, ruler of the Caribbean Sea. And your supposed to get married to the future-king of the Atlantic sea..", her conscience reasoned.

she sighed, "Actually that just lists up all the reasons why I should leave…", she thought. She got up, trying to regain her balance by spreading her arms out. Then she hopped elegantly from the rock and dove into the sea.

Her legs fused together and formed the graceful blue-grayish fish tail. Then she started to swim.

"this place looks pretty neat", she thought when she looked onto the sandy white beach of some island she had come across after a long swim through the Caribbean sea. A bit further inwards there were horse carriages traveling along the streets and some men in red uniforms were seated on horses, escorting a carriage along the way.

"That's my chance", she grinned and swum towards the beach. When she got onto the sand, she dragged herself along the beach until her legs started to appear. She got up quickly and walked towards the men in red uniform, that funnily enough reminded her of lobsters.

"Excuse me?"

she had come towards a very important looking man he had a white wig on with a black three-cornered hat on top of that. The fact that his hat was different looking than that of the other horse riders, told her that he most be more important. Mermaids and the like lived in the belief that the greater the hat of a human being the more important he must be from other human beings. So the ruler of human beings must have a really great hat!

Anyway, back to Katalinya, "excuse me sir?"

The man was sitting rigidly on that brown horse and looked almost bored, when he turned his head towards her voice, he nearly fell of his horse!

He coughed at the sudden image of a young blonde woman standing stark naked in front of him, "I was wondering, whether or not you could help me..?"

"Help! Of course, my lady! I see, are you being followed! Is he after you? Here, cover yourself with my coat!"

the man jumped from his horse and shrugged out of his read coat and slipped it onto the girl's shoulders.

"What happened to you?"

She opened her mouth to explain, then, however, she was cut off again, "How rude of me! I forgot to introduce myself, I am commodore James Norrington at your service. My men and I are escorting the Swanns from Newport to Port Royal, I am sure Miss Swann wouldn't mind if you would get a ride…"  
He put an arm around her shoulders and walked by his men who were all staring after the naked woman up to the carriage, he knocked on the door.

"Excuse me Elisabeth…"

The door to the carriage was opened and a young woman, probably by the age of Katalinya herself opened the door, her brown hair was elegantly done into a bun on her head, allowing very few strands of curls hanging loosely from it and down her neck. Katalinya decided that instant that she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. So was her dress! She was wearing a creamy-white dress with little pale flower stitches on it.

She looked perfectly shocked when she saw Katalinya. Well, understandably, Katalinya thought, next to this woman, the mermaid princess in disguise was pretty ugly. But what the mermaid didn't know was, that it wasn't her low self-esteem but the fact that she was naked that made the human woman gasp.

"James! What is going on!"

"This girl came running towards us, naked, begging for help! I am sure you won't mind if she travels along with you?"

"Of course not! Come in, Miss…"  
The commodore helped her into the carriage and soon she was seated opposite this Elisabeth person and another girl.

"I am Elisabeth Swann. Daughter of the Governor of Port Royal and this is my maid Anne. Tell me, who are you and what happened to you?"

Katalinya thought about it. How big of a chance did she have that this woman actually knew about mermaids? That guy with the black hat, had obviously thought she was in danger... well, why not play along.

"I am… Kat.. Katherine. And I was… attacked! I'm sorry.. But I am still a bit shocked and…"

"Oh... dear… that is horrible to hear…" Elisabeth started fussing around with a trunk next to Katalinya and pulled out a shirt of sorts.

"Here... pull this over and put the coat on top of that."  
The mermaid did as she was told and was covered and felt actually quite comfortable. 

"We are home very soon, you are welcome to stay with me and my family."

Katalinya or... Katherine, smiled at that, "That would be very nice of you."

_Here you go. The first chapter. I know it's kinda funky-fantasy with a mermaid and all … but I just felt like writing about a mermaid. lol_

Has nothing to do with the Disney movie the little mermaid, btw… hated that movie.. urgh… what has disney done to H.C. Andersen's great story! Turned it into a complete Disney movie! That's what! Originally, the mermaid dies because she does not get the prince and she turns into foam! Suckers… lol

_Have a nice day_


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